Scott H. Young's Blog, page 5

Lesson Three: Why You Can’t Focus

Focus is hard. And in the years since I’ve started writing, it has gotten harder.

Diagnoses of ADHD (including self-diagnoses) have skyrocketed. While it’s likely that some of this is due to a lessening of stigma around mental health issues revealing what was already there, anecdotally, it appears that people are having a much harder time concentrating than they used to.

The number of people I know who struggle to finish reading a single book, or who can’t seem to stay on task for more than twenty minutes without opening their email, seems to be getting worse.

Are Smartphones Ruining Our Brains?

While technology certainly plays a role in our collective distractibility, it’s probably not the case that Google is literally making us stupider, or that we’ve lost the ability to focus. I agree with cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham, who raises his eyebrows at the idea that our fundamental brain architecture could be reshaped in this way.

Instead, there’s a much simpler explanation for why focus is hard—and why it has gotten harder. In short, the ability to sustain attention on something is a function of two factors:

Pull. This is how much an activity draws in and motivates us to sustain our attention. True multitasking is a myth, and our attention can only focus on one thing at a time. As a result, the pull of an activity is always defined relative to everything else we could possibly be paying attention to at this moment.Friction. This is how much resistance, difficulty or effort is required to sustain engagement in an activity. Too much friction, and even something that should be compelling is pushed out for easier alternatives.

These two factors help to explain why focusing has gotten so difficult lately. We’re now in an environment where strong pulls on our attention are ubiquitous, so the relative pull for reading a great book is simply too quiet compared to the pull of social media or streaming television.

Second, many of our most potent distractions have become increasingly frictionless. When I started blogging two decades ago, reading my feeds meant going to the room with my computer (I still had a desktop), turning it on (which took forever), connecting to the internet, opening my RSS feed reader, and scrolling through an uncurated list of simple headlines to decide what to read.

Had I been born two decades later, I’d instead have TikTok, which only requires taking a device out of my pocket, with whatever content *it* deems most interesting served up to me instantaneously.

“Dumb” media and old-fashioned hobbies, which haven’t altered much, have the same pull and friction that they’ve always had. But they can’t compete with the attentional candy we now encounter regularly.

How to Improve Your Ability to Focus

This two-part model of focus suggests a simple answer for how you can focus better: increase the relative pull of an activity, reduce the friction, or both. And since pull and friction are defined relative to all salient alternatives, you can achieve the same impact by reducing the pull or increasing the friction of your most tempting distractions.

Let’s consider all four possibilities:

Increase the pull of focusing. Read more interesting books. Choose hobbies you find compelling. Join groups to integrate socializing with activities you enjoy. Measure your progress and give yourself rewards just for showing up.Decrease the friction of focusing. Have books always available. Have your hobbies “ready-to-go” rather than requiring lengthy setup. Stop reading books that bore you (read something else instead). Make it possible to quickly dip into the things you care about.Decrease the pull of distractions. Put your phone on grayscale. Switch your media consumption to RSS feeds, rather than algorithmically curated sources.Increase the friction of distractions. Keep your phone in a dedicated location in your house, rather than at your hip. Delete apps from your phone, so you need to log in with your computer.

A similar fourfold list of strategies can be employed for improving your focused work, not just your focused leisure: Increase the pull of deep work, decrease the pull of shallow work, decrease the friction of deep work, increase the friction of shallow work.

Shifting to a more focused life takes time and work. None of these changes are automatic, and it can take awhile for them to feel natural. But if you invest in a more focused life now, you can reap dividends for all your years to come. With sufficient time, these habits will become automatic and, sure enough, you’ll find yourself reading more books, engaging in more interesting hobbies and completing more meaningful projects.

Life of Focus, my course co-taught with Cal Newport, will begin on Monday, January 27th. If you’re interested in joining, I will be sending out registration information on Monday. I look forward to working with a dedicated group of students to help them improve their focus and achieve bigger things in 2025!

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Lesson Two: More Craft, Less Chores

I’ve always struggled with the idea of work-life balance. That’s not because I’m a workaholic or don’t value my leisure time. Instead, it’s because I work for myself. What counts as “work” and what counts as “leisure” is harder to separate when I make my own schedule and don’t get paid by the hour.

For instance, when I read a book that really interests me and then write about it later—was the reading work or fun? What if I had to read the book for research? What’s different between the drawings I do for fun and those I use on this blog?

Perhaps I’m an isolated case, but I’d like to think not. In the years Cal Newport and I have run Life of Focus, I’ve interacted with dozens of students who struggle with work and play being intermixed in both their time at home and their time formally allocated to an employer.

The situation is even more complicated for retirees, students, academics, and stay-at-home parents, many of whom aren’t “paid,” strictly speaking, for many things that clearly seem to be work.

Recently, however, I’ve stumbled into a distinction I think matters more than the one between work and life: that between craft and chores. While work seemingly embodies everything you must do to earn a living, and life is everything else, craft is all of the productive activities that utilize your creativity and skill in order to accomplish something you’re proud of, and chores are all the tasks that must be done to keep on going but don’t satisfy this same desire.

Maximize Craft Instead of Balancing Work

One thing I like about this revised approach is that it shifts the goals for our productive lives.

Working nonstop is not desirable. Burnout is real, and even if you love your job, pressure to perform continuously can be exhausting. If you add to that all the commitments you have outside of work, even a dream job can become a millstone around your neck if you aren’t careful.

Yet “balance” is definitionally hard to achieve.

Balance is akin to Aristotle’s maxim that virtue is to be found in moderation—except everyone’s definition of moderation is different. What’s a moderate amount of eating? Drinking? Going to the office? We end up falling back on cultural norms, where 9 to 5 is considered “balanced” even though a full-time job can be exhausting if you also have full-time childcare duties. And different cultures may have entirely different standards, in fact China’s infamous 9-9-6 start-up culture was sold as being *more* balanced than the nonstop-work ethic promoted at more aggressive firms.

In general, it’s easier to optimize a dimension of life by maximizing for something than by balancing between two extremes.

Given this, I prefer the idea of maximizing craft and minimizing chores across *both* my working life and personal life. I’d like to write more essays and spend less time filing taxes in my work, just as I’d like to finish more paintings and spend less time doing dishes at home.

How Do You Maximize Craft?

Definitions are nice, but how do you actually do this? Clearly, there will always be unavoidable chores both at work and at home. Spending more time on craft, while nice-sounding, can be hard to achieve in practice.

I believe the answer comes down to focus. In your work, if you can carve out regular chunks of time for deep work, you’ll start automatically shifting your work toward the dimension of “craft” and away from “chores.” In the beginning, that shift might come from simply being more efficient with the chores, even if their quantity hasn’t diminished. But, eventually, as you build “craft” accomplishments, it becomes easier to delegate and avoid chores in favor of more time spent on your craft.

We tend to specialize at what we regularly do, and if you spend your time on deep work, it creates a gravitational pull towards more deep work. Likewise, getting really good at chores makes you the person who gets assigned more chores.

At home, things are not quite as simple. Short of hiring an army of help, many chores will need to be done. But here, too, steps to maximize craft often succeed by squeezing out the hours spent on activities that are neither necessary chores nor meaningful crafts—the filler time spent endlessly scrolling on our phones or watching television shows we don’t even enjoy.

In the previous lesson, I argued that this year should be a year for doing something big—actually finishing a project you’ve had in mind for some time. Now, I’d like to encourage you to go further, to think about maximizing the feeling of craft throughout your life. Doing activities that require full engagement, genuine skill and give you a feeling of satisfaction when they’re completed.

In the next lesson, I’ll share a simple model for how to think about focus. In particular, what you can do to overcome some of your own internal resistance to maximizing craft and achieving big things. And on Monday, January 27th, I’ll reopen Life of Focus, my three-month course co-taught by Cal Newport. Stay tuned!

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Lesson One: Do Something Big This Year

Cal Newport and I are opening our Life of Focus course for a new session next week. Before we do, I’m sharing some lessons this week on how you can focus better in your work and life. Stay tuned!

I think about my life as a series of projects. I think you should, too.

Projects exist in the middle space of our productive activities. At one end we have tasks, the myriad things that need doing in our day-to-day lives: filing taxes, walking the dog, doing laundry, submitting that report. At the other end are our grand dreams for our lives: to be financially independent, travel the world, build a business or raise successful kids.

Grand dreams are nice, but they’re generally not very practical. It’s easy to get excited as you think them over, but rarely does even the most compelling grand dream tell you what, precisely, you should be doing on Tuesday morning to make it come true. Their size and distance makes them poor objects for sustaining motivation.

Tasks and to-do lists suffer from the opposite problem. You can check off lots of tasks while accomplishing nothing major. Sure, the house is a little cleaner, maybe you’ve balanced your chequebook and fixed the wobbly chair in the dining room, but these, like most tasks, simply sustain your current life. They don’t take you somewhere new.

Projects act as the bridge between grand dreams and daily action. A big life goal often can be achieved in a project or two. And a project can be achieved through a coordinated series of tasks.

The Mindset Needed to Habitually Complete Projects

Being good at completing projects requires a different mindset than being merely productive (and thus being good at checking off tasks) or ambitious (and thus coming up with grand visions for your life).

Completing projects requires focus.
Focus is not just the ability to sit down and work at something hard for hours at a time; it’s also learning how to ignore all the other things screaming for your attention. Sometimes those other things are entertainment or distractions. More often, they’re legitimate tasks and work that, if you heed their siren song, will have you crashing against the rocky shore of minutiae long before you reach your ambitious destination.

It’s Time to Finish What You Start

My guess is that you already have some project ideas. Perhaps some you’ve idly thought about. Perhaps some you’ve already committed to. Perhaps some that oscillate between daydreams and serious efforts.

This year, I suggest you go ahead and finish one of them. It doesn’t need to be the largest or most difficult project on your list—but it should be something that matters to you. Make this the year that you don’t just *think* about doing it, but actually finish it.

Certainly, this is easier said than done. Perhaps you have dreamt up projects that have gone nowhere. Maybe you’ve even insisted that “this time it’s different,” and you’re finally going to complete a project you’ve been thinking about for years—only to succumb to the relentless tide of distractions in the months ahead.

We’ve all been there.

If you are looking for help with this, I encourage you to join the upcoming session of our course, Life of Focus. In it, we’ll help you set and achieve a consistent deep work target—a necessity for making sustained progress. We’ll declutter your leisure time—creating space to tackle big things. And we’ll cultivate your ability to sustain your attention in the way, and on the things, you choose.

The full three-month course is a great complement to any big goal you’ve been meaning to accomplish, but I want to leave you with one strategy you can apply today: right now, start tracking the hours you spend working on the project you have in mind.

This doesn’t require fancy software or complicated calculations. A simple piece of paper where you tally every uninterrupted hour of work towards your project will suffice.

Put the tally on your wall, on your phone, or anywhere you will look at it often. By maintaining a visual reminder of your decision to focus, you can steadily move in the right direction.

Life of Focus, my three-month course co-taught with Cal Newport, will reopen for a new session on Monday, January 27, 2025.

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What I Learned (and Unlearned) Reading 10 Books on Nutrition

As I write this, I’m in the final stretch of the fourth month of my Foundations project.1

This month’s focus is on food.

Part of my goal for each month is to read as much as I can about each topic, both for my own knowledge and to try to summarize the essential expert recommendations for those participating in the course.

Food is a particularly tricky subject. Nutritional science is complicated—and often conflicting. Popular media on this topic is a cesspool of misinformation, hype, and some downright dangerous advice being presented as the road to good health.

Still, I wanted to do my best to get it right. Given my complete lack of credentials in this area, that meant focusing my reading more on textbooks (I read two, each 800+ pages), popular books noted for their scientific accuracy (I read three specifically for their high ratings from the non-profit Red Pen Reviews), and those written by scholars I respect. I also made heavy use of the podcast Sigma Nutrition, which presents academic discussions of nutritional research.2

I can’t say for sure that I got it all right. But after having read a few thousand pages and listened to many hours of scientific discussions, I suspect that much of the residual confusion I have is likely embedded in the field itself rather than a simple misunderstanding on my part.

The 3-Minute Summary of What I Learned (and Unlearned)

In terms of concision, it’s hard to beat Michael Pollan’s overall eating advice:

“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

Despite the complexity and contention of the underlying research, most advice for eating well is pretty basic:

Eat more whole foods.Eat more fruits and vegetables.Eat more fiber.Eat a range of different food types and foods within each type.Eat more whole grains.Go easy on the refined grains, added sugars, processed meat and saturated fat.

A seventh recommendation, though not universally agreed to, might be “Try to eat a bit more protein, particularly from plant and marine sources.”

But, in addition to these fairly uncontroversial ideas, I also found some repeated ideas that surprised me somewhat:

Egg yolks aren’t bad for you. Dietary cholesterol has a pretty minimal effect on blood cholesterol. Egg yolks famously have a lot of cholesterol, so they were unnecessarily vilified.Too much saturated fat is still bad for you. Trans fats are worse, of course, but most sources recommend swapping solid fats in your diet, like lard and butter, for healthy oils to reduce the risk of heart disease.Carbs aren’t bad for you. Carbs have replaced fat as the dietary villain of our age, but carbs are the body’s preferred energy source. Unrefined grains and carbs from fruit and vegetables are a boon for health.Most additives in food are safe. Whole foods are good, of course, but the belief that small amounts of preservatives or chemical food additives are the source of ill health seems largely unfounded. Processing strips nutrients and reformulates foods to make them easier to overconsume, but the additives themselves are largely harmless.Coffee and chocolate are healthy. In moderation, coffee appears to be a net positive for health. Chocolate, particularly dark chocolate, seems to be good as well. Chocolate has a lot of calories, so it’s easy to overconsume, but the type of saturated fat present in cacao isn’t harmful.

Despite this, there are still some controversies I couldn’t find a straight answer on. It’s still unclear to me whether whole milk or low-fat milk is better for health.3 I don’t know whether sodium reduction is mostly an issue for those with hypertension or whether cutting it is worthwhile if your blood pressure is normal.4 Obesity is also a major driver of diet-related illness, so it’s not clear to me whether the recommended dietary interventions promote health by reducing your chances of gaining weight, or by being generally good for lean people.5

Brief Notes on the 10 Books I Read

My favorite book of the month was Walter Willett’s Eat, Drink and Be Healthy. Not only is it the most highly-rated book in terms of scientific accuracy and healthfulness on Red Pen Reviews, but Willett is the world’s most-cited nutritional researcher.

The most engaging/fun read of the month was a re-read, Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food. His high-level recommendations on eating are difficult to fault, and there is much to say in favor of his philosophy of common-sense nutrition. I disagree with Pollan on some research he cites, but I feel like you’d hardly be led astray if you stick with his practical takeaways.

Now, let’s look at some notes from each book:

1. Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy by Walter Willett

Co-developed by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, this book is perhaps the most scientifically reputable, popular diet book available today. Willett, whose work on the Nurses’ Health Study made him one of the most world’s most-esteemed nutritional epidemiologists, provides his perspective on what science says we should eat to be healthy.

Most of the recommendations fit within the Mediterranean diet pattern—so-called because the famous Seven Countries Study found that inhabitants of Crete had much lower rates of heart disease, owing to their eating whole grains, lots of vegetables and seafood, little red meat and plenty of olive oil.

Despite its impeccable credentials, this book does depart in some ways from some of my other reading on nutrition. Willett continues to recommend moderate alcohol consumption for health, something that more recent data seem to be undermining.6 Similarly, Willett argues for reducing milk consumption across the board, whereas both textbooks I read argue for making milk a regular part of the diet for its calcium and vitamin D and choosing low-fat options to avoid its saturated fat. Willett also advocates for a daily multivitamin, something other sources have questioned.

 Given the quality of the source, it’s hard to say whether Willett or the textbook is correct on the issues where they diverge, so I chalk those areas up to uncertainty amongst qualified experts.

2. Eat, Drink, and Weigh Less by Mollie Katzen and Walter Willett

While the previous book is an excellent summary of the state of nutritional science, it’s not a weight-loss book, and parsing it for weight-loss recommendations might take some effort. Fortunately, Katzen and Willett have translated the dietary recommendations into a specific plan for someone who wants both to eat healthier and lose weight.

The basic strategy of all weight-loss diets is caloric restriction. However, reducing calories increases the risk of missing out on essential nutrients, which is a particular risk of fad or crash diets. This book might be worthwhile if you want to lose some weight in as healthful a way as possible.

3. Understanding Nutrition by Ellie Whitney and Sharon Rady Rolfes

This was my favorite textbook. While the detailed explanations of the biochemistry of energy metabolism might be unnecessary for most people, I love explanations that go deeper into the science.


One thing I didn’t know, for instance, was that many of the body’s cells rely on glucose for energy, but the body cannot make glucose from fat (it can make glucose from protein). Fat burning proceeds during low-intensity daily activity, but most physical activity requires some glucose for performance. This was one of many warnings against extremely low-carb diets I read in the more “official” sources I read for the month.

Interestingly, although the style and specific content covered differed between the textbooks I read, the recommendations for health in both textbooks were practically identical. I suspect this is because both are drawing on the same original source, rather than the authors independently arrived at the same conclusion. It doesn’t mean the advice is without controversy, but it was at least satisfying to note there does appear to be some nutritional orthodoxy that one can point to as being consistent.

4. Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics Complete Food & Nutrition Guide by Roberta L. Duyff

This book took me most of the month to read. I jokingly referred to it as “the phone book,” owing to its heft, as I lugged it between my home and office. 

Like a phone book, it was also far from the most exciting read. I can’t fault the author here, as it’s meant to be a reference book, so I don’t believe anyone was expecting it to be read cover-to-cover. But, that was exactly what I did, and I’m glad I made it through.

This book covers nearly any possible question you might have about food, ranging from the safety of artificial sweeteners to the proper handling of poultry, different types of eating disorders to the efficacy of sports supplements. Impossible to summarize, “the phone book” will sit on my shelf for any time I need to look up a particular nutritional question.

5. Everything Fat Loss by Ben Carpenter

Weight loss, perhaps even more so than general nutrition advice, is rampant with false promises, inflated hype, dangerous diets and outright scams.

I found Carpenter’s book after seeing that it received the second-highest rating on Red Pen Reviews, after Willett’s book.7 This book is like an encyclopedia of body composition strategies, evaluating everything from low-carb to low-fat, from intermittent fasting to weight maintenance.

While the book is useful for its specifics, the general message is pretty simple: weight loss occurs through a calorie deficit. There are many different ways to achieve this, so finding a way that works for you, your palate and your mental health should be the priority.

6. The Hungry Brain by Stephan Guyenet

I first read this book several years ago and loved it so much I wrote an entire review and had Dr. Guyenet on my podcast for an interview.

Guyenet makes a compelling case that the organ responsible for the obesity epidemic is the brain. We have evolved fascinating and complicated mechanisms to regulate our feelings of hunger, fullness, satisfaction and food reward that drive us to eat an appropriate amount. Except in our modern environment, these circuits often push us to maintain much more fat than is healthy.

Unfortunately, the takeaways from Guyenet’s work are hardly the inspiring you-can-do-it messages of most diet books. Guyenet argues that, to a large extent, we overeat because food today is more tasty, plentiful, convenient and varied than it used to be, all of which encourages us to eat more than we should.

7. The Good Gut by Justin Sonnenburg and Erica Sonnenburg

The gut microbiome is one of the hot topics in nutritional research these days.8 The authors point to speculative links between our bacterial residents and allergies, obesity, memory and depression.

I found the book interesting, and it made me keen to add a little more kimchi and yogurt to my diet. But it didn’t feel solid enough to inspire changes to my diet that weren’t already suggested elsewhere. File this one under speculative.

8. The Endurance Diet by Matt Fitzgerald

Sports nutritionist Matt Fitzgerald summarizes the diet for optimal performance, which is followed by nearly all elite endurance athletes (and recreational runners and cyclists should adopt). He boils it down to five habits:

Eat everything. Don’t omit major food categories, such as grains, meat or dairy.Eat quality. Eat mostly whole, unprocessed and unrefined foods.Eat carb-centered. Carbs are the best fuel for endurance.Eat enough. While most of us eat too much, many athletes (especially women) eat too little. Worries about weight should take a back seat to eating enough to power performance.Eat individually. Your diet must work for you, your culture and your tastebuds.

Overall, I found a lot to like about Fitzgerald’s book, although it’s clearly aimed at avid runners, cyclists, swimmers and other athletes rather than the generally-sedentary population at large.

9. The New Power Eating by Susan Kleiner with Maggie Greenwood-Robinson

To round out the sports-centered nutrition books, I wanted to see how prescriptions vary for strength athletes, whose main goals are building muscle and power rather than aerobic fitness.

Fortunately, the recommendations are quite similar. Carbs are also important for strength training since glucose, not fat, can be broken down anaerobically in muscle tissues for the power needed for hard workouts, and hard workouts are needed to provide the muscles with appropriate stimulus to grow.

The main difference is that the authors of this book focused, somewhat predictably, on eating more protein than was recommended in the guidance for endurance athletes.

10. In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan

I first read this book years ago, after liking Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma. At it’s heart, I basically agree with Pollan’s advice and overall philosophy: eat real food, eat more plants, eat in moderation, and focus on cooking good food rather than consuming ultra-processed junk.

However, after reading many other books, I feel some of Pollan’s tirades miss the mark. He spends a lot of time writing about how the “lipid hypothesis” that nutritionists recommended for years has been debunked. But then he casually flips back and forth between correctly rejecting the idea that all fat is bad and presenting the false idea that nutritional science has decided that saturated fats aren’t worth worrying about (the consensus is that they are).

Similarly, Pollan gives a lot of space to both Gary Taubes and T. Colin Campbell. Taubes’ insistence that sugar is the cause of the obesity epidemic (as opposed to excess calorie consumption, in general) is probably false. Campbell’s advocacy of a strict vegetarian diet, in turn, is probably based on some shaky science.

That said, Pollan articulates better than anyone else I read the philosophy of eating, not just to optimize nutrition, but for living better. That means cooking real food, using whole ingredients with less processing, and trusting more traditional diets rather than scientifically engineered concoctions.

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Food – Opening Update

I’m writing this on the first day of the fourth month in my year-long foundations project.1 The focus for this month is on food. See here for my previous months focusing on fitness, productivity and money.

What we eat is a central foundation in life. Food provides the energy we use to live. It is a bond with our friends and family. It’s a connection to our culture. And it’s a source of enjoyment and pleasure.

Still, for many of us, our foundation of food is problematic. Untethered from good health and communal traditions, our eating behaviors are making us sick and lonely. We don’t have time to cook and sit together for meals, and at the same time, obesity rates have skyrocketed.

Fixing this problem, even in one’s own life, isn’t easy. Just as it is evident we don’t eat healthy on the whole, it is just as evident that the failure to eat healthy isn’t any individual’s “fault.” Our food environment has changed dramatically, and unconscious hormonal and neural signals that served our ancestors well now makes us sick.

My Food History

My own relationship with food is atypical. I had severe allergies to nuts and dairy as a child. Fortunately, I outgrew the dairy allergy, but it meant that my childhood was always centered around caution and avoidance of foods that were utterly normal to other people. I rarely had candy at Halloween, for instance, because few treats were safe. I was often the kid who brought a separate snack to a party because I didn’t want to get sick.

As a teenager, I was persuaded that eating a vegetarian diet was the path to health. I read a few books, notably, The China Study, which made the argument that dropping animal products was a reliable path to healthy eating. Perhaps because of my early childhood experiences with food avoidance, I didn’t find it difficult to stick to long-term.

I’m more doubtful of the health benefits of veganism than I was as a teenager, but I still think they have a valid argument for both ethical and environmental reasons. Today, I eat fish, eggs and dairy, and I try not to be overly paranoid about other animal products in my food, consumed in small amounts—the way I see it, some degree of vegetarianism is probably better on the whole, but it’s easy go overboard and be annoying to others regarding dietary restrictions.

I wouldn’t advocate for anyone to start eating as I do unless they are already interested in it. Most people fail to sustain extreme dietary restrictions, and it’s not at all clear that meat ought to be the first thing to drop if you are simply trying to improve the health quality of your diet. Still, I tend to think a whole-food pescatarian diet is pretty healthy, so given that this is already the status quo for me, I don’t feel compelled to make a shift to start eating more meat.

Food Falters

Despite what may seem to many to be an already fairly restrictive diet, I can’t say in all honesty that my eating patterns are maximally healthy. It’s still possible to overeat, and plenty of junk food is totally vegan.

When I was in my early twenties, I could eat whatever I wanted without gaining any weight. Indeed, since I was often lifting weights, trying to gain weight was more frequently my challenge—I had to set an intention to try to put on pounds.

But, as I reached my late twenties, this was no longer true. Absent any special effort, I started to gain weight. At my peak, I weighed at least 20 lbs. above my typical college-aged weight and probably 15 lbs. above my ideal weight.

The reasons I gained weight were probably the same as everyone: I ate too much. I ate out frequently. Work and parenting pressures meant less sleep and more stress. I didn’t exercise with the same vigor as my twenty-year-old self.

Refocusing on Health

When I began working on my fitness foundation three months ago, I was naturally drawn to getting a head start on the reading for nutrition, too.

Owing to the confusion surrounding nutritional advice, and my own history of being overly swayed by a somewhat ideological author’s advice for eating, I wanted to stick more to the science—keeping my focus on higher quality books as rated by independent reviewers, as well as following sources that scrutinize a lot of the scientific details behind dietary guidance.

This background reading, in combination with my renewed exercise habits, has led to a general improvement in my eating patterns. I’ve now lost about 10 lbs. from my peak weight, even though restricting my food intake wasn’t a priority.

Some of the things I strived for in the past few months that helped with this goal include:

Eating more fruits and vegetables.Switching refined carbohydrates for whole grains when possible.Packing a lunch for work rather than eating out.Eating a big breakfast.Controlling portions when healthy options aren’t available.Not snacking after dinner has finished.

These recommendations, which came up in my readings, seem to have worked well without any explicit aim to restrict calories. My case is probably atypical, but I was pleased to see that simply trying to eat healthier foods and managing my appetite seemed to be enough to lose some weight, along with the significant increase in my physical activity since the first month of this project.

Plans for the Month Ahead

Since I’ve already made many of the shifts I had initially planned to eat healthier, my focus for this month is largely trying to formalize the changes I am already doing informally.

In particular, I think the habits I want to sustain long-term are less like my earlier forays into highly restrictive eating patterns, but more about planning and preparation. The things I want to ensure I do this month include:

Buy enough healthy food at the grocery store, so it’s always available.Make sure I have healthy options for packing lunches.Have healthy options for snacking/desserts.

My breakfasts, lunches and snacks tend to be fairly independent, so I have the most control over those. But I eat dinners with my family, and I usually have a lunch or two per week with people I work with. Similarly, there are often events, family gatherings, vacations and other situations where having complete control over what I eat is unrealistic.

Therefore, for those situations less under my control, the behaviors I want to cultivate are:

Choose healthier options when possible.Opt for reasonable portion sizes when healthy options aren’t available.Plan ahead to eat healthy food before going to a place where only unhealthy options are available, so portion control becomes easier to attain.

These are guidelines, not hard rules. I think if I can be 80-90% successful with them, the moments where I indulge won’t matter so much. My goal isn’t to restrict myself from enjoying food I really do want, but to make it so such indulgences don’t detract from an overall healthy eating pattern.

Additionally, I am taking the step of tracking what I eat for the month. This step is a bit a tedious, especially given that I’m not really concerned about my dietary quality at the moment. However, since I have this month to focus on food, I figured it would give me some insight into my eating patterns that might be useful when I’m no longer focusing on food, specifically.

Non-Nutritional Goals for Eating Better

At this point, it may sound like I’m trying to become a health-obsessed dieting weirdo. And I admit, this is a real concern. While it’s pretty clear the standard Western diet is incredibly unhealthy, it’s also pretty clear that an obsession with healthy eating is probably not great for your mental health.

My ultimate goal for the month is to establish enough strong habits and default options that thinking about healthy eating isn’t an issue—it’s just what I do unthinkingly in most situations. 

But I also want to recognize those situations where health isn’t my primary goal when eating. Noticing how my plans interfere with these non-nutritional goals is also important, because I want to make my habits sustainable, and I want to eat delicious food, too.

I want to be able to enjoy family gatherings, eat at restaurants and on vacation, enjoy a wide variety of delicious foods and not feel hungry throughout the day. I’ll be keeping an eye on these factors as well, because a maximally healthy diet that means eating monotonous, bland meals in isolation is neither something I want nor can sustain.

Want to Improve Your Foundation for This Month?

I’m going into a lot more detail on the lessons I’m gathering from my research in the Foundations course. But, anyone who wants to improve how they eat is welcome to join me, informally, for this month’s project.

The habit we’re cultivating this month is flexible food planning. This simply means taking steps to shape your food environment, from buying healthier food at the grocery store, to planning healthier meals. If you’re really serious about changing your diet, you’re also welcome to go all the way to fully planning your meals a week in advance and tracking your calories, but this additional step is not necessary for most people to make improvements. Even little things like dropping sugary drinks or adding more vegetables to your plate are still worth doing.

At the end of the month, I’ll share notes from the books I read, as well as provide an update of how my month focused on food went.

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Money – Month-End Update

I’m now rounding out the third month in my year-long project to improve my foundations.1


This month’s focus was money. In particular, the keystone habit I asked students of my course to work on this month was setting up a system to track their expenses and reviewing it at least monthly.

Monthly expense tracking has been a habit of mine for almost two decades, so my personal challenge this month was to:

Improve my tracking. Prior to this month, my wife and I tracked dozens of different spending categories. We reorganized our system so we have main categories and subcategories, making it easy to see how much we spend on “big picture” items while also having enough detail that we can get specific in any particular area (for instance, how much of our food costs is due to eating out versus groceries?)Get term life insurance. I applied for term life insurance for myself. I decided to get a policy that would cover our outstanding mortgage balance, since the other financial assets I have should be enough to cover any other expenses.Rebalance my assets. This was a concern of mine as I don’t feel my asset allocation so far has been done in a particularly principled way. However, reading dozens of books (including the better part of a 1000-page textbook on investing) didn’t really persuade me to change my strategy much. I probably want to start shifting some of my assets into a bond index, but I’d rather do that with newer savings rather than rebalancing the investments I already have. I still think, given my age and work flexibility, an 80-90 percent equity portfolio is the way to go.

Overall, my money foundation month was more about deepening my knowledge base rather than radically changing my habits. Going in, I felt pretty good about my overall savings levels, investment strategy and money management in general, but it was nice to dig a bit deeper into this topic and affirm some of my long-standing commitments.

Planning for My Financial Future

Another step I took this month was to do some explicit calculations of my financial goals. I ran a few scenarios looking at what I can expect long-term under different future conditions based on my current assets.

This exercise helped me see what my financial position would be if I tried to retire immediately, in ten years, or not until I’m in my seventies. I don’t plan on stopping work anytime soon, but sometimes misfortune strikes and we’re not given that choice. It was a useful exercise for seeing how my financial foundation could support my family in the case that my business failed or I somehow became incapable of earning a similar income.

This kind of analysis of net worth and retirement goals is not complicated to do, but I had never actually done it before.

Feeling Good About Money

Another thing this month helped me with was with feeling better about my money, in general. For years, I have been comfortably saving more than I was spending, so I didn’t think much about money at all. But my wife and I bought a house two years ago, and the combined pressure of watching the investments we had for the down payment take a tumble, having a mortgage, and seeing interest rates rise2 added some financial stress.

I don’t say this as a complaint—I’m acutely aware of how fortunate we are. But it was stressful, nonetheless.

Doing the work of comparing our actual spending to our current financial picture, including the variety of possible future scenarios for investment return, interest rates, and even my ability to work and continue this business, made me a lot more comfortable about our plans going forward.
While there’s a stereotype of the person who doesn’t look at their bank accounts to avoid financial anxiety, I think I tend to be the opposite. If I can’t see what my goals are and whether or not I’m reaching them, I get more anxious about spending, especially when things like my mortgage payments jump up considerably.

Being Committed to the Strategy

The other lesson I took from my extensive reading this month was the importance of emotional resolve in one’s financial plan. It’s relatively easy to describe an investing strategy, but it seems it’s much harder to commit to a plan when it’s losing money in the short-term, even if it is a good strategy in the long-term.

I decided not to alter my asset allocation considerably, despite all my reading. One reason for this was simply that I feel like the informational bar for making changes to your investing strategy needs to be relatively high, otherwise there’s a temptation to panic when the market crashes, or chase winners when the market is irrationally high. In this sense, I feel like a relatively simple strategy with fewer funds and choices is probably better for me, even if it isn’t completely optimal from a theoretical perspective. Simplicity is easier to commit to intellectually and stick to in practice even when it doesn’t look like it’s paying off. It’s hard to have the discipline to rebalance your portfolio *into* the “losers” year after year to stay consistent with a strategy, so having fewer items to rebalance seems valuable  from a behavioral standpoint.

Time will tell whether my particular choices were correct, but I have become more convinced that commitment matters more than cleverness when it comes to managing investments.

Updates to Fitness and Productivity

In addition to working on my money this month, I also sustained my previous two foundations, fitness and productivity.

Fitness continued to go well. I’ve now had my third month where I haven’t missed a daily workout, although a couple of those defaulted to a low-intensity stretch. I now feel like my cardiovascular fitness is about as good as it’s ever been. I’m still rebuilding my strength to get to my past peak of about 5 years ago, but I haven’t plateaued yet.

I’m also about 10 lbs. lighter than when I began three months ago. Losing weight wasn’t an initial goal, but it’s been a nice perk.

The productivity system I initially set up continues, although I still feel like there are a few kinks that need ironing out. I think being more consistent about the weekly and daily reviews, especially the collaborative ones with my wife at the end of the week, are essential for getting the system to work smoothly.

Still, I feel like productivity was already a solid foundation for me, so this is more of an effort to smooth off some remaining rough edges.

_ _ _

With the first quarter of the year-long project concluding, I’m feeling good about going into the next nine months. Next month focuses on food—I’ll share my opening update for that one next week!

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Insights from Ten Useful Books on Money

I’m rounding out the third month in my year-long Foundations project. This month’s focus was money. You can also see my notes on books from the previous two months covering fitness and productivity.

Next week, I’ll share some of the steps my wife and I took this month to improve our family’s financial situation. But first, I want to share some notes from the ten books on finances and money management I read this month.

I’m far from an expert in finance, but of all the foundations I’m covering, it’s one of the few where I actually have some formal training—my university degree is from the business school at University of Manitoba, and I also took several economics courses during the MIT Challenge. Thus, a lot of my reading this month was a refresher rather than a first pass. Still, it can be helpful to be reminded of things we have learned before, especially if we want to implement them consistently in our behavior.

The 1-Minute Summary of What I Learned

Here’s a brief overview of the major lessons from this month’s readings:

Being rich is different from looking rich. The easiest way to find yourself broke on a high income is to try to appear like you have a lot of money.You can’t beat the market. Virtually all investors are better off with simple index investing than paying a professional portfolio manager.Successful investing is more about courage than brains. Sticking to a strategy—even when it looks like you’re losing money—is incredibly hard. Most investors chase past winners and end up lowering their returns, since those investments that did well in the recent past tend to be somewhat overvalued compared to the recent “losers.”The financial industry is full of scams and predatory behavior. While agency issues exist in all fields, professional financial advising has one of the worst track records when it comes to balancing profit motives with fiduciary duty to clients.Practice eclipses theory in investing. Empirically, investing has been solved. Theoretically, finance is still poorly understood, and many of the most widely-used models don’t neatly line up with empirical tests.Notes on the Ten Books I Read

My favorite book of the month was Burton Malkiel’s A Random Walk Down Wall Street. While Malkiel’s advice does not differ substantially from what I have seen elsewhere, he does a good job explaining all the different schools of thought on investing and giving them a fair shake.

For those interested in a purely practical guide, Ramit Sethi’s I Will Teach You To Be Rich is the best. It outlines, step-by-step, the best advice for managing your money. Nothing Ramit recommends is contradicted by my other research, and his book was definitely the most comprehensive.

The most interesting/enjoyable read was Morgan Housel’s The Psychology of Money.

1. The Millionaire Next Door by Thomas Stanley and William Danko

I have mixed feelings about this book.

On one hand, I found the detailed survey data on the habits of wealthy individuals to be fascinating. The authors gathered a treasure trove on all sorts of behaviors associated with being wealthy, down to the amount rich people spend on watches and which brands of cars they drive.

To broadly summarize, typical millionaires don’t look especially rich. They often live in modest homes in modest neighborhoods and don’t spend a lot of money, despite having healthy earnings. That’s why they’re rich.

My major annoyance with this book is that the authors invented two income-adjusted categories of individuals: Prodigious Accumulators of Wealth (PAW) and Under Accumulators of Wealth (UAW). These are people who have more or less wealth, respectively, than would be expected given their income. The authors spend much of the book continually expressing amazement at what a frugal bunch of people these PAWs are.

But this is tautologically true! If you control for income, someone with a lot of wealth necessarily spends less money than they could. The authors found that frugality matters because they defined their investigation so it was the only thing that could matter.1

Savings rates definitely matter to wealth. But the authors’ sleight of hand makes it look as though it’s the only thing that matters—ignoring a person’s income. This is a useful trick if you want to moralize about wasteful consumption, but perhaps less honest if you’re trying to ask why some people have more money than others.

2. Your Money or Your Life by Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez

A classic from the “financial independence” side of personal finance advice, I found this book helpful not for any grand insight it offered, but for its subtle reframing of how to think about money.

Most of us measure our spending in terms of dollars and cents. Robin and Dominguez, in contrast, argue that we ought to calculate our “true” wage (meaning the amount we earn minus any costs associated with our employment, such as cars for commuting, lunches at the office or clothing we wear to work) and then use that to determine how many hours and minutes everything we buy costs us. Money is a renewable resource, but our time is not—knowing how much of our life’s energy we spend when we buy things can be a powerful way to curb spending.

3. I Will Teach You To Be Rich by Ramit Sethi

I’ve known Ramit for decades. Indeed, I have an email he sent me, introducing himself, when we were both still skinny, college-aged bloggers. Now he has a NYT bestselling book, a multimillion-dollar business empire and a Netflix show.

I read the first edition of Ramit’s book when it came out over a decade ago, and I still think it’s one of the best. Ramit is both specific and practical in his advice, giving concrete details for how to automate your savings, which banks to use, what to invest in and how to negotiate a better salary.

But beyond the advice, I think what I enjoy most about Ramit’s perspective is that he manages to advocate for financial prudence without falling into the “spending is evil” trap so common in personal finance literature. While it’s true that most Westerners ought to spend less and save more, if you read too many personal finance books, you might forget that you can use money to make your life better and that obsessive penny-pinching isn’t the only way to live.

4. The Simple Path to Wealth by JL Collins

Collins takes the philosophy of index investing—that low-cost, simple portfolios beat actively managed, complex investments—to an extreme. He argues that you pretty much only need to put your money into one fund: Vanguard’s total stock market portfolio.

This makes Collins a bit of a contrarian from most portfolio management perspectives. Investing 100% in stocks is generally considered a very risky portfolio. Perhaps the popularity of this strategy is simply due to the US’s excellent bull market run since the Great Recession.

However, I can see the advantages of simplicity, even if it’s suboptimal from the point of view of modern portfolio theory. A simpler investment has fewer traps to catch yourself in. Complicated investment schemes require you to regularly rebalance your portfolio and make it more likely for investors to try to time the market or chase supposedly superior asset classes.

5. Unconventional Success by David Swensen

Swensen is a legendary figure in investing circles. Running Yale’s endowment fund, he regularly returned better-than-market averages. In doing so, he also flipped the conventional wisdom on how to properly manage such funds on its head—arguing that the truly long-term viewpoint of endowment funds should be tilted more towards equities than was traditionally considered appropriate.

While Swensen does give investing advice, the most interesting part of this book is the numerous industry stories about ways Wall Street screws over retail investors. He devotes considerable time to documenting the various scandals ranging from outright fraud to legal-but-unethical practices that pit profit motive against fiduciary duty. Sadly, it seems profit wins nearly every time.

The only piece of advice Swensen gave that diverges from other sources is his emphasis on a relatively high degree of diversification between asset classes. In this sense, he takes the opposite approach to Collins by emphasizing a mixture of US and global equities, US treasury bonds, TIPS and REITs rather than going all-in on a single fund.

I found Swensen’s approach intellectually satisfying, but his method also requires a fair degree of rebalancing to keep the portfolio strategy consistent, which can be difficult for an average investor to sustain behaviorally and can potentially incur capital gains taxes.

6. The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel

This was fun to listen to as an audiobook. Housel is an excellent writer. He weaves together fascinating stories about our all-too-human failings with money and ties them to universal principles of sound money management.

Perhaps my favorite anecdote from the book was the amount by which people underrate compound interest. Warren Buffett is rich, having over $140 billion. He’s a good investor, making roughly 20% annualized returns. But—and this fact is less often emphasized—he is also really old. Starting at age 10, he has been seriously investing for 84 years!

Housel calculates that if Buffett had started investing at 30 and retired at 65, his final net worth would be a little over $11 million (with an m, not a b), even including his impressive return rate. Compound interest is hard for our brains to comprehend.

7. The Little Book of Common Sense Investing by John Bogle

Bogle has done more for the average investor than perhaps any other individual in history. He launched The Vanguard Group and pioneered the practice of index investing. Today, an investor can match the return rate of the entire stock market for less than a tenth of a percentage point in fees every year.

This book summarizes Bogle’s case for index investing, drawing on extensive expert testimony explaining why buying shares in the entire stock or bond market and simply holding them regardless of market movements is the correct investment strategy for most investors.

Bogle’s advice is simple, but it’s far from simplistic. The advice to put your money in index funds is nearly universal among academics, and it’s similarly common among professional money managers (at least when they’re not trying to sell you a specific product they may profit from).

Bogle is contrarian in his focus on only domestic securities and his dismissal of ETFs. I tend to think some international diversification is prudent (although higher fees need to be accounted for), and that ETFs are in some ways a better investing vehicle than traditional mutual funds (although it depends on the exact fund). Those two points excepted, I agreed with virtually everything Bogle had to say about where to put your money.

8. Personal Financial Planning: Theory and Practice by Michael Dalton and James Dalton

This textbook was a whopper. At over 1000 pages, I have to admit I did not read every section. Much of it gave a fairly detailed explanation of US tax law, which was nice for clarification but utterly irrelevant to my own situation (I’m Canadian).

Still, this book covers a lot of topics central to personal financial planning outside of investing. It explains things like constructing a personal balance sheet, determining the correct amount of insurance (life, home, car), and simple calculations for checking if you are meeting your financial goals.

9. Investments by Zvi Bodie, Alex Kane and Alan Marcus

Being my second 1000+ page textbook of the month, I also read this book selectively. In the end, I read about half, focusing on the basic theory and portfolio management parts and skipping over security analysis and the pricing of options and bonds.

I thought the theoretical discussion of investing was most interesting. I learned CAPM in business school, so it was interesting to see how it has struggled to match empirical predictions. Nonetheless, it is still widely used for evaluating investment return.

I also found myself somewhat begrudgingly agreeing with Nassim Nicholas Taleb when reading the discussion of risks.2 Variance alone seems like an inadequate description of risk, especially when taking an international perspective, when entire stock markets have closed or had investor assets nationalized/confiscated during political turmoil. Clearly, the daily volatility of a stock price is not the only risk you’re taking when you invest.

10. A Random Walk Down Wall Street by Burton Malkiel

This book was my favorite of the month. Malkiel, a Princeton economist, covers a lot of intellectual ground in how to think about investing while writing in engaging prose and giving practical advice.

While I read a lot of books that basically argued for broad-based, low-cost index investing, I felt Malkiel gave the fairest description of the major competing philosophies, from technical and fundamental analysis to the “greater fool” theory of behavioral finance.

Malkiel’s book has long been a classic of investing, but I also appreciate how he updates it frequently to fit current circumstances, even including discussions of cryptocurrency in the most recent edition. While the core principles haven’t changed between editions, the actual experience of the market has changed many times, so it’s nice to see these principles applied across various time periods.

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My Best Essays in 2024

As we head towards the end of the year, I thought it would be nice to recap some of my best writing from the past twelve months, in case you missed it.

I published 48 essays to the blog this year (plus another two for my Foundations project which will come out before year’s end). More significantly, this year also saw the publishing of my second book, Get Better at Anything, as well as the launch of my new course and project, Foundations.

Here are my favorite essays from 2024:

The 10,000 Hour Rule is a Myth. The common interpretation of this rule directly contradicts the research that was used to create it. But even more, the idea that a particular number of hours leads to achieving mastery is a kind of category error in thinking.The Science of Mental Models. My review of Philip Johnson-Laird’s excellent book How We Reason explains how his theory of mental models reconciles how we can have science and philosophy, despite our frequent reasoning mistakes.You’re Trying to Do Too Much. The difference between additive and subtractive productivity, and why the latter is underrated in our age of constant busyness.The Universal Foundations for a Good Life. My essay introducing the idea of foundations—universal habits and skills that underpin a good life—that led to my current year-long project.The Three Gaps. There are three gaps that exist between ideal conduct and our actual practice: between the best possible approach and what experts think is best; between what experts think is best and what everyday people think is best; and between what everyday people think is best and what they actually do. I argue that the third gap is perhaps the largest (and most stubborn) to close in most areas of our life.Is Speaking Multiple Languages Overrated? I love learning languages. But is it better to spend more time mastering one language, or to dabble in a few? Here I present the case against my own bias towards polyglottism, arguing that most people are probably better off getting really good at a second language rather than adding a third, fourth (or seventh!).The 6 Causes of Burnout (and How to Avoid It). A look at leading burnout researcher Christina Maslach’s work on the real reasons we burn out.5 Tips for Staying Focused (When You’re Stressed). A lot of readers told me this was their favorite essay in the past year, helping them cope with their own stresses. I give a brief primer on how stress impacts cognition, and offer some strategies drawn from various stress-reduction methodologies to cope.

I hope everyone enjoys the holidays!

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Money – Day One

Money is the third foundation in my year-long project (and course) to improve the universal elements of a good life.

Today is the first day of my challenge for this foundation.1 In case you missed them, here are my updates and notes from the previous two foundations:

Fitness Notes: beginning, ending, books
Productivity Notes: beginning, ending, books

Money is an interesting foundation. It’s highly technical, driven by spreadsheets and equations—but it’s also emotionally charged, driven by greed and fear.

Nobody naturally thinks about money the purely rational way economists say we should—instead, we come with the enormous baggage of our beliefs about how we should think and value money.

Why Care About Money?

Unlike fitness or productivity, which many people overlook, few elements of modern life are as omnipresent as money. If you work, you probably spend much of your daily life doing things in order to get money. In your off time, you spend even more time thinking about how to spend, save or invest the money you earned.

This obsession with money tends to cause extreme views on its true importance. On one end are people who derive their self-worth from their net worth and judge those around them by the size of their bank account. On the other end are those who insist that money doesn’t matter at all.

The truth is somewhere in between.

Money alone can’t make you happy—but it can provide options in your life that do offer happiness: financial freedom, not needing to work for extra years into your retirement, being able to travel or get an education. Money makes a difference.



At the same time, the idea that becoming really rich will somehow fix all your problems is perhaps one of the greatest self-delusions. Financial health matters, but your physical health matters more, as do your relationships with your kids, friends and family members.

So it’s with some trepidation that I write about money, one of the most emotionally-charged and contentious topics in this entire project. But it’s these very emotions money evokes that make it worth exploring in more depth.

My Money Story

I have been incredibly fortunate in my life. Financially, my family and I are well-off. I’ve been financially independent since my early twenties. I’ve never had any consumer or student debt. And for nearly two decades, I’ve earned more than I spent, leading to fairly substantial savings.2

Looking back, I can see three sources of amazing luck I’ve had in my life that helped me arrive where I am today:

First, my parents. My parents were both public school teachers, and we lived in a modest home in a small town. They offered me some help with accommodations during my first couple years of university, but otherwise did not pay my tuition or living expenses. Since then, I haven’t received any financial assistance from them or any other relatives.

But my parents gave me something worth far more than an inheritance: they showed me how to live within my means. My parents always stuck to a budget, paid credit cards off in full and never took out loans for anything other than a car or house. These financial behaviors are so normal for me that it took years before I understood that some people buy things on credit cards when they don’t have enough money to pay for it in their chequing account.

To be fair, my parents weren’t poor or cheap, either. We had the good fortune of living a solid middle-class lifestyle where paying for food, shelter, books and the occasional vacation were never an issue. Financial prudence and stability were part of my childhood, which I belatedly learned is often not the case.

My second source of good fortune was deciding to go into business for myself in my late teens. After learning about “solopreneur” software developers when I was fifteen, my life’s dream became to run an independent online business.

On its own, there’s nothing particularly prudent about my choice. It was a gamble then, certainly. While making money online is the dream of the average teenager today, it was almost unimaginable to a normal person in 2004.

In the beginning, my goal was modest: I wanted to make $20,000 a year, which was enough money to live off my business full-time. If I could hit that threshold, I would be able to devote myself to growing the business. Despite that initially modest target, it still took me seven years of near-constant work to reach it. 



During that time, I lived quite frugally. But, again, I was a college student. Everyone around me was broke too, so there was no difficulty or stigma for living cheaply as I worked on my side hustle. When I finally did start earning past my original goal, I was so used to living cheaply that I was fine letting my business income contract during projects like the MIT Challenge or my Year Without English.

Since then, my business has grown. I’ve hired a team, published a bestselling book, and partnered with Cal Newport on two course projects.3

In the rearview mirror, those decisions appear prescient. It turns out 2006 was an excellent time to start writing online. The first project that put me over my initial goal, a monthly study-skills subscription, was a decade before Substack made premium content subscriptions a widely-accepted business model.

While it would be easy to pat myself on the back for my foresight, the truth is that I got lucky. Yes, there was a lot of hard work, but the wind was at my back in ways I cannot take credit for.

The third source of good fortune in my financial life was learning the right way to invest money early, and saving a substantial portion of my earnings.

Before I knew much about business or finance, I was lucky to get pushed toward the idea that investing in low-cost index funds is the best financial strategy. This belief was further reinforced as I went through business school and studied finance formally. By the time I was in a position to save anything, I was able to put most of my extra income into one of the best-performing vehicles for growing wealth.

This was fortunate. In the early days of my personal development, I spent a lot of time reading advice for various life domains online. I shudder to think of what I might have put my money in had I heeded the advice to pick stocks, gamble with leveraged investments, or chase crypto fortunes that pervades internet discussions today.

Instead, my money has mostly grown steadily in the decade-and-a-half I’ve been able to invest.

I bring up these three points not to brag—there are plenty of people who are much richer or savvier money managers than me—but to underscore the outsized role luck plays in financial health. Good practices matter, I know people who were dealt better hands than I was but still struggle with money problems, but few domains are as skewed to the vagaries of chance as money. And in this case, I can count myself extremely lucky.

My Plan for the Month

In the Foundations course, this month’s focus is tracking spending. Getting a complete picture of your financial health and habits is necessary for making adjustments, and most people don’t track their money adequately to do this.

Since I’ve maintained this habit pretty consistently for nearly two decades, my personal goals for the month diverge slightly from what I’m advocating in the course. In particular, I want to look at three areas of improvement:

Updating our family’s monthly expense tracking. Since getting married, my wife and I have kept joint expense spreadsheets for our household. We’ve been through a few versions of these, but I want to make some tweaks to make the system is easier to use. I also want to more clearly incorporate other aspects of our personal balance sheet so its easier to see if we’re on track to reach our financial goals.Improving my investing. I already invest in low-cost index funds. For the last decade, I’ve mostly ignored my investing strategy, preferring to park any extra money in index funds and let the stock market do whatever it will. However, now that I’m managing more money, there are probably gains to be made by improving my asset allocation and investment timing decisions.4Getting life insurance. For the longest time, I didn’t really worry about insurance. I had no dependents and enough emergency funds to cover almost any eventuality. Now, I’m a provider for my family, and if I were to suddenly die or couldn’t work, it could make it hard for my family to continue to live as we do currently.

Since I already feel comfortable with my basic money management, I’m using this month as a chance to deepen my knowledge and to look for things I might be missing. I have a 1000+ page textbook, Personal Financial Planning: Theory and Practice, on my desk right now and another large textbook on investing arriving in a few days. While a lot of it seems to be things I already know, there’s always a chance I’m missing something that could make a material difference.

Despite my current material comfort, I never really strived to be rich. Instead, I wanted to be free. Free to choose how I work and live without needing to worry about money. Many of the residual worries I have around money seem to stem more from my beliefs than my bank accounts. And so another major focus in my reading for the month is going to be on that psychology—not just to be materially secure, but to foster the psychological security that money cannot buy.

Want to Improve Your Money Foundation for This Month?

While I’ll be going into a lot more detail on the financial advice I’m reading (and have read over the last two decades) in the Foundations course, anyone following this challenge here is free to join too.

All you need to do to participate is to start tracking your spending and conducting a monthly review to ensure you’re moving toward your goals. I use a custom spreadsheet, but the service YouNeedABudget.com has been recommended to me multiple times as an excellent tool. I also recommend Ramit Sethi’s book I Will Teach You To Be Rich, which is a fairly comprehensive guide for mastering the basics of your financial life.

At the end of the month, I’ll share some notes from the books I read, as well as offer some final reflections on which changes I made in the month to improve this important foundation.

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Productivity – Month-End Update

As I’m writing this, I’m nearly at the end of the second month in my year-long Foundations project.1 This month’s focus was productivity, specifically creating and maintaining a full-capture productivity system. You can also see my opening update and books reviewed.

Overall, the month was a success. Behaviorally speaking, I was already fairly close to where I want to be, so I decided to refurbish my system instead of starting from scratch.

The main tweaks I made to my productivity system were:

Reorganizing all of my lists. My system had degenerated over time into somewhat scattered lists for different projects and goals. Now my setup consists of:NEXT ACTION lists for work/personal and home. The latter is shared with my wife so we can coordinate on household chores and family tasks.SOMEDAY/MAYBE lists for work and home. Keeping these separate from my regular to-do list has helped reduce clutter. When I want to remember a task, but am not sure whether I want to pursue it right now, I put it on this list—particularly if it’s a lower priority.CALENDAR. I was already using this, but I took some extra steps to coordinate calendars with my wife so we don’t have as much back-and-forth when booking events as a family.Other lists, including IDEAS, GROCERIES (divided by shopping location), PROJECTS and WAITING.For work tasks, I also made subdivisions for TODAY and THIS WEEK to maintain the weekly/daily goals system I’ve been using for years while still keeping my entire to-do list visible.I decided to make a principled decision about keeping all deadlines and temporal reminders within the to-do list system (rather than on my calendar) unless they are hard deadlines. My calendar had been getting a little cluttered with various deadlines that weren’t really hard deadlines. By adding time-based reminders, I can follow up on tasks that I don’t want to think about now without having them cluttering my calendar.Did I Actually Get More Done?

As might be expected given my renewed focus on productivity, I was pretty productive this month—especially at home, which was a bit of a weakness in my old system. I spent the first two weeks of the month changing lightbulbs and fixing door hinges that had been neglected.

However, I think it’s misleading to claim this is due entirely to my new system. Productivity is heavily influenced by focus and motivation, so it’s natural to have a spike in productivity when you suddenly start focusing on it, which happened with my household projects.

While I’m glad to have a bunch of little nagging projects done, the real benefits to this month’s foundation are long-term. Namely, have I built a system that will reduce psychic friction in the long run?

Given that the tweaks I’ve made have been relatively modest, I’m optimistic that I’ll be able to resolve some of the weaknesses I noted in the past. Particularly on the home front, having organized, shared calendars and to-do lists with assigned responsibilities has made it easier to get clear on what needs to be done at home.

At the same time, writing down a task doesn’t mean you’ll do it. I still haven’t gotten a family doctor, something I had written as a to-do list item in my opening update but didn’t set aside time to get figured out. This doesn’t seem to be a failure of my capture system; it’s simply not a task I prioritized. 


Plans for the Long Term

I think one reason I delayed many household or personal tasks was that during the workday, I prioritized work. When I got home, dinner and bedtime for the kids would occupy me until around 8 or 9 pm, after which there was usually only an hour or so before I’d have to sleep. As a result, even if the chores were relatively modest, I was tackling them at my lowest energy. Given that few of these tasks were urgent, it was easier to say I’d do it later.

In my work, a successful strategy for dealing with these issues has been explicitly planning when I’ll do work. Keeping a weekly/daily goals list has been one of my better productivity habits for work since it carves a manageable chunk that can be accomplished from the infinite to-do list.

To make progress on the household work more reliably, I think I’ll need a similar focus on setting goals—perhaps monthly, weekly or daily—for chores or projects we intend to accomplish now, versus projects we’d like to take on one day. Recognizing that the time to do these chores is always going to be when I’m tired (or when I’m also minding the kids) means I need to set realistic goals here but also accept that being tired isn’t a good excuse for not doing them, since I’m never going to be able to work on them full of energy and total focus.

Of course, another powerful solution is simply to lower expectations. It’s easier to populate a to-do list than to do the work on that list, so being more aggressive about shifting things I don’t intend to do imminently to my someday/maybe list is probably smart.

Overall, this month was a success, but there are still more tweaks to be made, which I’ll strive to be mindful of as I go into future months.

Follow-Up on Fitness

Fitness continued to go well throughout the second month. I maintained my unbroken streak of daily exercise, including during a week-long vacation. Before this project, I rarely exercised on vacation (after all, isn’t it supposed to be a vacation?), but I found I really enjoy running in a new location. Thinking of trips as a chance to do something new with fitness, rather than as a break from it, has been a mindset shift for me.

I also did my longest-ever run—17 km (10.5 miles)—during the trip. Since running has gotten easier, I’ve found it enjoyable to go farther. While running 10 km would have been a real strain for most of my life, it’s now easy enough that I can comfortably listen to an audiobook without getting distracted while I run.

My strength is improving, but I’m still nowhere near my peak strength of about 5 years ago. I expect it will take a year or more to rebuild, as I had largely neglected weights since the start of the pandemic. But given that strength training is secondary to cardiovascular exercise in my current routine, I’m not going to fret too much over my rate of progress here.

My weight on the scale hasn’t changed much from the 4 or 5 pounds I lost initially, although a few people have told me that it looks like I’ve lost more weight. Perhaps there’s some change in body composition, but I haven’t done enough careful measurements to know for sure. I’m still above my college-age weight by at least 12 pounds, but given that I’m also trying to rebuild muscle mass, I’m not striving to drop it too quickly.

With the second month’s foundation concluding (and the first month continuing strong), I’m moving next month to the third foundation: money. I’ll share my opening update in the next essay!

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